Quantum vs Classical statistics — metaphysics of objecthood

0:00 Thank you very much, everyone, and I'm very grateful to Michelle for the invitation to take care of Colonel Catherine at our unfortunate service. So, many thanks. I want to do so from the point of view of a certain project of mine. So I'll start off briefly with that, because it motivates the problem. So as I see it, there's still something quite useful in the formal linguistic framework across both sides, and somewhat to my surprise, a lesson from parasitism is that Formal logic doesn't do a lot for us. It seems to me that what it can do is not to reconstruct physical theories in a first-order form, not to axiomatize in the way that Hilbert thought we should or the way that Russell and Kahneman thought we should, but to be clearer upon how to talk. The reason why formal logical methods may be useful all the time, of course, is because the criterion for what is an object is very clear, and it does seem to me it's a great achievement, flowering in the work, or coming to its fulfillment in the work of Quine, to see how bound quantification

2:30 That really is the key to the ontology. Now the further ingredient that really drives the program along is when one supposes that the equality sign is to be defined. And the reason that drives the program is because if defined in terms of predicates, the first question determining the ontology of the theory is what are the expected predicates? And once those are fixed, the criterion of objectivity is fixed, whatever is discerned using those predicates is then fit for our application. And furthermore, there's a very natural criterion for what should be talking about in the light of the theory, and namely, they should be varied.